“Slavery was capitalism’s experiment of how much it could extract from the human body. You can not talk about capitalism without speaking about white supremacy. White supremacist work culture is grind culture, is hustle culture, is being told that productivity is a function of your worth. White supremacy has been using the body as a tool of destruction since the beginning. Grind culture is nothing but the continuation of what has been happening on plantations for centuries. [..] To not rest is really being violent towards your body, to allign yourself with a system that says your body doesn’t belong to you, keep working, you are simply a tool for our production. To allign yourself with that is a slow spiritual death as well. [..] So I named sleep deprivation as a racial justice issue, as a social justice issue, as a public health issue, it’s key to any type of liberation. My ancestors knew that. Even though they had no autonomy over their body. Literally human machines working 20 hours a day sometimes on plantations, in the sun, picking cotton, picking tobacco, they were human machines and they still found ways to subvert, slow down production, find joy, rest. [..] To me rest is about more than naps, it’s really about an ethos, and a perspective, and a pushing back and a way of living and a way of life that is slowed down, that is connected, that is magnetic, that is distilled down into a place where we really are looking at ourselves as who we really are. This is a spiritual work. [..] In activist culture we also are grinding, using the white supremacist work culture to do our work. I did a training last year and everyone was so exhausted, as soon as I asked ‘are you guys tired?’ they just started weeping. They were just like, “I’m tired, I’m sick. I keep going, I keep going because the work has to be done.” I don’t feel like we can actually get to liberation by repeating the same trauma that has been done to us. [..] Rest distrubts the cycle of trauma. To take a moment to intentionally say no. To push back and say no, my body doesn’t belong to capitalism, it belongs to me. My body is divinity. Every time our body wants to rest and we ignore it, each time we ignore it is another time of us putting trauma unto our physical bodies. So to intentionally do that is such a beautiful offering to ourselves. To collectively do that is a direct action.”
For the Wild podcast interviewed Tricia Hersey, founder of the Nap Ministry, on Rest as Resistance https://forthewild.world/listen/tricia-hersey-on-rest-as-resistance-185
I can never just quote one segment of this podcast and I still feel like I’m not doing it justice because I did not quote anything of the part about rest and healing the earth, and more. Absolutely 100% recommend listening to this entire interview.
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